De Nederlandse Mozilla-gemeenschap

We are happy to announce the results of the Mozilla Research Grant program for the second half of 2017. This was a competitive process, with over 70 applicants. After three rounds of judging, we selected a total of fourteen proposals, ranging from building tools to support open web platform projects like Rust and WebAssembly to designing digital assistants for low- and middle- income families and exploring decentralized web projects in the Orkney Islands. All these projects support Mozilla’s mission to make the Internet safer, more empowering, and more accessible.

The Mozilla Research Grants program is part of Mozilla’s Emerging Technologies commitment to being a world-class example of inclusive innovation and impact culture-and reflects Mozilla’s commitment to open innovation, continuously exploring new possibilities with and for diverse communities.

The Mozilla Manifesto states that “Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.”

Today, Mozilla is seeking artists, media producers, and storytellers who share that belief — and who use their art to make a difference.

Mozilla’s Creative Media Grants program is now accepting submissions. The program awards grants ranging from $10,000 to $35,000 for films, apps, storytelling, and other forms of media that explore topics like mass surveillance and the erosion of online privacy.

What we’re looking for

We seek to support producers creating work on the web, about the web, and for a broad public. Producers should share Mozilla’s concern that the private communications of internet citizens are increasingly being monitored and monetized by state and corporate actors.

As we move to an era of ubiquitous and connected digital technology, Mozilla sees a vital role for media produced in the public interest that advocates for internet citizens being informed, empowered and in control of their digital lives.

Imagine: An open-source browser extension that reveals how much Facebook really knows about you. Or artwork and journalism that examine how women’s personal data is tracked and commodified online.

(These are real projects, created by artists who now receive Mozilla Creative Media grants. Learn more about Data Selfie and Chupadados.)

The audiences for this work should be primarily in Europe and Latin America.

While this does not preclude makers from other regions from applying, content and approach must be relevant to one of these two regions.

All applications must be in English, and applicants are encouraged to read the application guide. Applications will be open until Midnight Pacific time December 31st, 2017. Applications will be reviewed January 2018.

Yahoo Holdings and Oath filed a complaint against Mozilla on December 1, 2017, claiming that we improperly terminated the agreement between Mozilla and Yahoo. Today, in response, Mozilla filed a cross-complaint against Yahoo Holdings and Oath for breach of contract.

While this is a legal matter and much of it is confidential, as Mozilla, we want to share as much information as we can in the spirit of our values of openness and transparency.

We started a wiki page with links to relevant public court documents – over time we expect to add more content as it becomes public.

Our official statement on this matter is:

“On December 1, Yahoo Holdings and Oath filed a legal complaint against Mozilla in Santa Clara County court claiming that we improperly terminated our agreement. On December 5, Mozilla filed a cross-complaint seeking to ensure that our rights under our contract with Yahoo are enforced.

We recently exercised our contractual right to terminate our agreement with Yahoo based on a number of factors including doing what’s best for our brand, our effort to provide quality web search, and the broader content experience for our users.

Immediately following Yahoo’s acquisition, we undertook a lengthy, multi-month process to seek assurances from Yahoo and its acquirers with respect to those factors. When it became clear that continuing to use Yahoo as our default search provider would have a negative impact on all of the above, we exercised our contractual right to terminate the agreement and entered into an agreement with another provider.

The terms of our contract are clear and our post-termination rights under our contract with Yahoo should continue to be enforced. We enter into all of our relationships with a shared goal to deliver a great user experience and further the web as an open platform. No relationship should end this way – litigation doesn’t further any goals for the ecosystem. Still, we are proud of how we conducted our business and product work throughout the relationship, how we handled the termination of the agreement, and we are confident in our legal positions.

We remain focused on the recent launch of Firefox Quantum and our commitment to protecting the internet as a global public resource, especially at a time when user rights like net neutrality and privacy are under attack.”

It’s not often I get to invite artists and developers to collaborate together so I’m excited to see how they respond to the Reality Redrawn Challenge from Mozilla which launches today. The boundaries between truth and fiction are becoming harder to define, in part because of the proliferation of fake news and other forms of misinformation. Mozilla wants to shed light on this by sponsoring public demonstrations, using mixed reality and other art media that make the power of misinformation and its potential impacts visible and visceral.

We live in strange times in which legitimate news organizations such as CNN have to launch advertising campaigns to remind people what real information is. Meanwhile social networks that connect millions more people struggle to help them differentiate truth from fiction and to define their unplanned role as media platforms.

Throughout historic moments of upheaval people have used art to make sense of what appears to be dystopian reality. The west side of the Berlin wall became one of the largest canvases in the world as Berliners attempted to make sense of their divided city, while the east side remained blank as none were allowed to get close enough to paint. I also like to remember that Jazz icon and civil rights activist Nina Simone set an enduring challenge to all artists when she asked “how can you be an artist and not reflect the times?”

Mixed reality includes all the ways in which 3D virtual content can be integrated with someone’s perception of the physical world around them, from simple enhancements of everyday experiences with augmented reality to completely synthesized immersive virtual reality worlds, and all variations in between. You can read more about Mozilla’s contribution to the space here.

For this challenge, traditional as well as digital and mixed media artists are invited to submit applications for three levels of financial support. One semi finalist will receive $15,000. Two will receive $7,500 each and two more will receive $5,000 each. Submissions can be made from anywhere in the world on the challenge website. Judging will begin on January 3 and finish on January 15 2018.

After the winners are announced they will have three months in which to complete their work. We’re excited to partner with The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose where the winners’ work will then be exhibited. The Tech’s landmark building welcomes more than 500,000 visitors a year with 135,000 square feet of exhibits and activities that empower people to use technology to solve problems.

The Reality Redrawn Challenge is part of the Mozilla Information Trust Initiative announced August 8 to build a movement to fight misinformation online. The initiative aims to stimulate work towards this goal on products, research, literacy and creative interventions. Today’s announcement marks the first effort within the creative space. I am excited to see how artists respond to the crisis of truth that is infecting more and more people’s experience of the web.

Mozilla's revenue increased to over $500M in 2016. Good for them! Some people have asked why all that money, and Mozilla's 1,200-ish staff, are needed just to build Firefox.

In practice building and maintaining a truly independent browser is incredibly expensive. (By truly independent, I mean a browser with its own implementation of HTML, CSS, JS, etc; this kind of independence is critically important to the open Web, and the world, and hence Mozilla's mission.)

Why is it so expensive? First you have to do the obvious stuff: implement the client browser engine and interface. Web standards are vast and complicated and ever-evolving, so this is a vast and complicated task. For this kind of security-critical, long-lived software in an intensely competitive mass market, you have do a very high-quality job, paying attention to all the various "ilities" — security, compatibility, performance, portability, accessibility, internationalization, maintainability, and so on. But also these days a large server-side investment is needed: downloads, updates, addons, crash collection, telemetry, push notifications, sync, and so on. Then you have to support all your developers with CI, massive test infrastructure, analysis and viewing of crash and telemetry data, etc. You also support your developers by writing custom tools and improving open-source tools; for example the rr project was born at Mozilla to improve life for Mozilla's C++ developers.

If you care about the open Web standards you're implementing, then your people need to spend time doing standards work. Since you have an independent engine you need to constantly evangelise Web developers and manage other external relationships.

If you want to stay competitive for the long term you need something like Mozilla Research, building stuff like Rust and Servo to explore technology that may give you a competitive edge in years to come.

Your product needs to be in the hands of users to be relevant, so you need marketing, distribution, events and other kinds of user outreach.

Then of course you have all the people needed to let the above people do their work effectively — HR, PR, lawyers, accountants, logistics, office managers, personnel managers, executives, and so on.

I worked at Mozilla for a long time. Over the last five years headcount was at about the quoted level, even during the FirefoxOS years. We were constantly butting up against headcount limits, having more work than we had people to do it. 1,200 people is barely enough. In the future it might not be enough.

Of course if you're willing to give up on engine independence you can save a lot of those expenses by adopting another vendor's engine, probably Chromium, and drafting off Google's investment. It's no surprise that for-profit companies would take that path, and that only Apple and Microsoft, companies with deep pockets and deep fear of Google, have declined to do so (though even Microsoft has caved on Android). Of course, using the same engine as Chrome limits your options for competing against Chrome, but it's tough to argue that those extra options are worth more than the cost. This is one reason among many why Mozilla is so important: it's Mozilla's mission that justifies the costs of maintaining an independent browser engine.

From an usability standpoint, the biggest new is that now you can silence the XSS filter not just whitelisting ("Always allow requests from... to...") but also blacklisting ("Always block...").
Of course, much more to come in the next days and weeks...

The State of Mozilla includes information about how Mozilla operates along with some highlights and detailed financial reports for 2016.

(We know it’s currently 2017- as a non-profit organization, we release this report when we submit our tax filing for the previous year.)

Mozilla is not your average company. Mozilla was founded nearly 20 years ago with the mission to ensure the internet is a global public resource that is open and accessible to all and the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto still guide our work today. Mozilla exists to protect the health of the internet and maintain the critical balance between commercial profit and public benefit.

Today, we remain dedicated to the mission in all the work we do, products we develop, and the partnerships, allies, and investments we make.

In a world with new and evolving threats to the open internet, innovation, user control, and our privacy and security, the Mozilla mission is more important now than ever before. There are billions of people online today who face these risks and every day thousands of Mozillians (employees, allies, volunteers, donors, supporters) fight to promote openness, innovation and opportunity online. We are proudly taking our place in the world to protect the free and open and open internet at a time when the fight needs a leader more than ever.

We measure our success not only by the adoption of our products, but also by our ability to increase the control people have in their online lives, our impact on the internet, our contribution to standards, and how we work to protect the health of the internet.

None of the work we do or the impact we have would at Mozilla would be possible without the dedication of our global community of contributors and loyal Firefox users. We are incredibly grateful for the support and we will continue to fight for the open internet.

We encourage you to get involved to help protect the future of the internet, join Mozilla.

The State of Mozilla includes information about how Mozilla operates along with some highlights and detailed financial reports for 2016.

(We know it’s currently 2017- as a non-profit organization, we release this report when we submit our tax filing for the previous year.)

Mozilla is not your average company. Mozilla was founded nearly 20 years ago with the mission to ensure the internet is a global public resource that is open and accessible to all and the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto still guide our work today. Mozilla exists to protect the health of the internet and maintain the critical balance between commercial profit and public benefit.

Today, we remain dedicated to the mission in all the work we do, products we develop, and the partnerships, allies, and investments we make.

In a world with new and evolving threats to the open internet, innovation, user control, and our privacy and security, the Mozilla mission is more important now than ever before. There are billions of people online today who face these risks and every day thousands of Mozillians (employees, allies, volunteers, donors, supporters) fight to promote openness, innovation and opportunity online. We are proudly taking our place in the world to protect the free and open and open internet at a time when the fight needs a leader more than ever.

We measure our success not only by the adoption of our products, but also by our ability to increase the control people have in their online lives, our impact on the internet, our contribution to standards, and how we work to protect the health of the internet.

None of the work we do or the impact we have would at Mozilla would be possible without the dedication of our global community of contributors and loyal Firefox users. We are incredibly grateful for the support and we will continue to fight for the open internet.

We encourage you to get involved to help protect the future of the internet, join Mozilla.

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain come highly recommended. My wife and I saw them last night in Leicester’s De Montfort Hall, and had a wonderful time. They take themselves only semi-seriously, and play a wide range of music; if you’ve never heard Blur’s Song2 played on a bank of eight massed ukuleles, your cultural education is not complete.

They play all around the world, so hopefully there’s a date near you in the next six months.

NoScript Quantum 10.1.4 is out, and while it might seem a fairly minor release, it does fix some performance issues under the hood and a quite annoying bug making maximized windows "jump down" when you open the NoScript UI. Talking of which, now that these back-end cleanup is done, I can finally give some more love to all the suggestion about improving usability that you kindly provided so far.

Starting with the XSS popup, which unfortunately cannot be an "old style", interactive but out of your way, notification anymore because of limitations in the WebExtensions (I cannot even open the NoScript menu programmatically, it must be reacting to user's input); but can, for instance, include an "always block requests from a.com to b.com" to make it less noisy.

Thank you also for all the UI prototypes and wireframes you've sent, I'm gonna start trying merging some of these ideas right away :)

Earlier this year,
my team started using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for our planning.
It's been a learning process.
I had some prior experience with OKRs at Google,
but I've never felt like I was fully taking advantage of the …

Since the launch of Common Voice, we have collected hundreds of thousands of voice samples through our website and iOS app. Today, we are releasing a first version of that voice collection into the public domain.

From our beginning, Mozilla has relied on the creativity, compassion, and resourcefulness of people all over the world to help us build and promote the web as a global public resource accessible to all. This has been the foundation of our experimental work in the field of machine learning and speech recognition, and in building a large, high-quality voice data resource with Common Voice.

This collection contains nearly 400,000 recordings from 20,000 different people, resulting in around 500 hours of speech. To date it is already the second largest publicly available voice dataset that we know about, and people around the world are adding and validating new samples all the time!

Having ourselves experienced how difficult it can be to find publicly available data for our speech technology work, we also provide links to all the other large voice collections we know about on the site. And we are eager to continue growing the website as a central hub for voice data.

When we look at today’s voice ecosystem, we see many developers, makers, startups, and researchers who want to experiment with and build voice-enabled technologies. But most of us only have access to fairly limited collection of voice data; an essential component for creating high-quality speech recognition engines. This voice data can cost upwards of tens of thousands of dollars and is insufficient in scale for creating speech recognition at a level people expect. By providing this new public dataset, we want to help overcome these barriers and make it easier to create new and better speech recognition systems (like our own Deep Speech). We’ve started with English, but we will soon support every language. With our parallel work on an open source speech-to-text engine, we hope to open up speech technology so that more people can get involved, innovate, and compete with the larger players.

Are you interested in learning about our open-source speech recognition project “Deep Speech” and how Common Voice data can be used to create better speech recognition products? Reuben Morais from Mozilla’s Machine Learning team just published an article about their “Journey to <10% Word Error Rate”. It provides a compelling summary of the challenges and learnings while working towards the team’s first open-source speech recognition engine model, which has been released today on their github repository!

We continue to welcome collaborators on Common Voice. Please reach out with any ideas that you have about how we can work together, to let us know how you are using the data, or to give us feedback on how this project could be more useful.